D&D General My Super Simple Mass Combat/Battle/War System

[Yenrak]

The basic rule is this: it's a straight roll of a D20 for each side. Whoever rolls higher, is winning the battle.

The side that lost the round must "save" by making a morale check. It starts at 5 plus however much they lost the first round by. The second loss it goes to 10. The third it goes to 15. And so on.

When you lose your morale check, you lose the battle.

You can break this down further by doing it unit by unit. Or keep it simple and have the rolls apply to entire armies.

We can make this slightly more complex by allowing each player to control a unit. It doesn't matter how big or small the unit is. They're always fighting against the same size unit. It could be 5 vs. 5 or 5000 vs. 5000.

The player characters get to make an attack against an enemy. We'll make that enemy be a commander of the opposite unit. (Note: this is just a mechanic. The players don't necessarily have to be attacking an individual commander. It's just how we resolve how the player's attack works or doesn't work). Pick an enemy from the Monster Manual. If the player's attack succeeds against the enemy, their side gets advantage on the D20 roll for combat. (If you want the other side to have heroes, you can have them attack the players. If this attack works, they also get advantage.)

Should we have healers? Sure. A healer in charge of a unit can reduce the morale climb by 5 instead of attacking.

That's it. Super simple.

What do you think?

 

[Zardnaar]

To complicated. Use a d4 instead.

May be a bit to abstract.

 

[Yenrak]

To complicated. Use a d4 instead.

May be a bit to abstract.

I like that. I defaulted to D20 just out of habit of mind.

Could totally be any other die.

 

[payn]

Too random. I wouldn't feel like any choices I made leading up to the mass combat really mattered.

 

[Zardnaar]

I like that. I defaulted to D20 just out of habit of mind.

Could totally be any other die.

I think you coukd use your basic idea fleshed out a bit. It's essentially a coin toss.

I was thinking of s basic one. Each class gets a general idea that they add to the dice rolls.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

On the most abstract level I like it well enough for deciding how a background battle is playing out, but if the players are getting involved in strategic planning for this battle it's going to be pretty disappointing when none of the strategy matters.

Also if I'm a high level caster I'm going to want to annihilate big chunks of armies with Meteor Swarms, and Earthquakes, and turning into a dragon or whatever.

That's not to say that the effects of all that sort of stuff can't reasonably be handled by imposing advantage or disadvantage on various morale rolls, and maybe the DM just saying a unit breaks and runs when they are hit with a devastating area of effect or something.

D&D is built around skirmish combat, so the sooner PCs can be steered into skirmishes with individual enemies and the battle can move into the background (and be decided mostly by random rolls), the better, but as long as they are involved in top level strategy their strategic decisions have to have consequences.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

I like the streamlined simplicity. However, if Players are interested in the gamefication of a battle then they're probably interested in pushing figures around on a map with long sticks in a proper wargame.

I did a few battles in Curse of the Crimson Throne. One I did narratively and gave the Players a set of things they could choose from to take part in the battle.* They chose to attack the fire belching cannon emplacement.

At the end of the campaign I mixed the rules for Axis and Allies with Risk and a little bit of Stratego to make for a proper wargame. Occasionally we would refocus from the overall battle to individual scenes on the ground where the Players' Characters would have direct battles with the enemy.

* They could of course choose to do something else not on the list - this is Dungeons and Dragons after all.